Diamond Advertising and Civil Strife

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that advertising contributes to the conditions that cause prices to increase, making diamonds ever more valuable for clandestine transactions among the world's criminals and terrorists. The author points out that the media is responsible for carrying the messages that create the demand; the mine owners create the profit motive. The paper concludes that, even though diamonds reach the consumer via a number of criminal, corrupt, or terrorist individuals or organizations, De Beers's advertising is at the root of the civil wars, international ill will, and maiming and murdering of civilians, which happens in the countries that produce at least the so-called "blood diamonds".

From the Paper:

"It was noted in the introduction that De Beers conducted an advertising campaign to decrease the number of those "forever" gemstones available for resale from family treasures, as well as using advertising worldwide to increase demand. This article contends that De Beers, which had been directly involved in Sierra Leone until the 1980s, did much more to control the prices paid for diamonds, which would in turn control the lengths people would go to in order to obtain them. After the beginning of the Sierra Leone civil wars, De Beers "its attempts to mop up supplies everywhere in the world, De Beers not only sustained the artificially high price of diamonds, it also undoubtedly bought diamonds from war zones"."

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